Are the designs of UFOs really confined by the technological hurdle or are aliens (or faking contactees) really out of imaginations?

I was always wondering why the visual descriptions given by contactees and abductees are so bleak and spartan. There are really few reports that people saw really high-tech looking stuff. Those who were invited inside of alien ships describe what's likely to be out of some real F-grade budget sci-fi schlock fest. They describe control rooms that makes 50s sci-fi B movies look like Ridley Scott's visual masterpiece.

I bet there's no Grey or Nordic equivalent of Syd Mead or something. I am beginning to suspect that aesthetics are unique property of human race. When I saw that flying humanoid video, I was wondering why it couldn't look like Jehuty from Zone of the Enders.

I guess aliens should really start abducting hundreds of design students from renowned design institutes around the world. Or, maybe aliens should kidnap someone like Ikuto Yamash**a, who designed the fighter crafts in Yukikaze the anime.

I wonder if there was something truly alien, would a human brain even be able to comprehend what they were seeing?

I like to call this "The undiscovered numbers and colors theory"; one of my all time favorites

Basically, if you saw something truly foreign, you could only relate it to something you know, thus doing no justice to what you actually saw. It's kind of hard to explain, but think of it this way; even though we only see a fraction of the color spectrum, what if you saw a new color? Would you know it was a new color? What would you compare it to?

That actually makes alot of sense. Kind of like the way people did in the ancient times when they saw aliens. All they could comprehend was that it must be god because that's all they knew.

I must admit to being rather amused that the slightly over-sensitive word filter has bleeped out part of the name "Yamash**a" there.
Perhaps the aliens are able to re-design the appearance their equipment to match each individual's expectation of what a UFo ought to look like? perhaps if a design studentb was adubted, to them, it would look suitably cutting-edge, but to a hick from Hicksville, Ohio (where most abductees seem to come from), it would look like something from a 50's B movie, and the aliens would be correspondingly small and green, whereas to a UFO expert, they'd look more like you'd expect a Grey to look.

back in the medieval times, people saw angels quite a lot, didn't they; you couldn't move for angelic hosts. Now they see aliens. Could they be the same thing, I wonder, only as people have become less religious and more technological, they think of what they see in different terms?

The designs tend to be similar in that they are disc or ball shaped.

This might have more to do with function rather than aesthetics. Also the stereo typical image of a UFO tends to be something out of the 1950s comics, so I think we all have a preconception of what UFOs are likely to look like.

Its like the invention of the wheel, there are different designs, but essentially its always going to be round, otherwise it would not work !

I wonder what they'll be described as 500 years from now, provided that the human race will still be around.

I'm pretty sure I saw new colors once. I was at work, going about my day, when everything went all screwy colored for just a second. I'm pretty sure some of the colors where ones I had never seen, but it just happened for a moment, and I didn't even realise anything was out of the ordinary until it was over. It was like for just a second, part of my brain worked a different way, and I experienced colors differently, but when it was over, I couldn't remember the new colors because my brain didn't work that way anymore. I don't know if I woke up on the wrong side of the bed, or if I had a bad sinus, or if it's just one of those weird things that happen, but it was a cool experience. I've never had anything like that happen since.

That is an interesting theory that I have seen from time to time in sci-fi films. When you think about it, if just on our own planet we were able to go back in time with our current technology and wanted to communicate with people from thousands of years ago. We would probably do a study of their culture and myths and try and communicate with them using themes relevant to their worldview at the time, not our current one.

Yes, I think so.

When the Central American Indians saw the first Spanish galleons approaching their shores they didn't fail to see them. They saw them as "houses floating on the sea," which wasn't unreasonable.

When meteorites, which are truly extraterrestrial, come crashing into our atmosphere, we do see them.

Had there been Lunarians on the Moon when the astronauts arrived in 1969 I assume they would have seen the Earthmen and their craft.

But the point is that they did see those "gods." Misinterpreting what you see is different from not seeing it at all.

I never said it wasn't.